IN A NUTSHELL:The crosshairs aren’t behind them; they’re washed out, as occurs for any thin object photographed against an overexposed bright background, especially after repeated analog duplications of a photo. The apparently covered crosshairs are often visible in the original pictures.

THE DETAILS: The Hasselblad cameras used for most Moon photographs were fitted with a glass plate on which uniformly spaced crosshairs were etched.

Crosshairs on a glass plate inside a Hasselblad camera. The film magazine has been removed for clarity.

These crosshairs, known as fiducials or reseau marks, were 1 millimeter (0.039 inches) long and 0.02 millimeters (0.00078 inches) wide and were arranged in a 5 x 5 grid. The central crosshair was larger to distinguish it from the others and indicate the center of the original photograph. The crosshairs were used to reveal any warping during the developing, printing and duplication processes and for distance measurements. The glass plate, or reseau plate, was in direct contact with the film when a photograph was taken. This superimposed the crosshairs directly on the original shot.

Moon hoax theorists point to the curious fact that in some of the Apollo photographs these crosshairs are behind the objects being photographed, as can be seen for example below.

Suspicious crosshairs according to David Percy.

According to David Percy in the TV show Did We Land on the Moon? (2001), “this situation is impossible and has to be the result of technical manipulation and doctoring of the image”. But actually there’s a very simple explanation for this allegedly “impossible” situation. The main clue is in the pictures chosen by the Fox show: every object that appears to cover the crosshairs is white and strongly lit by sunlight.

It turns out that if you take a photograph of a dark, thin object against a bright, overexposed background, the thin object tends to disappear: it gets washed out by the surrounding glare. This effect is well-known to photographers and can be seen for example below, where the black thread that crosses the picture becomes invisible when it lies in front of the brightly sunlit model astronaut. The same effect occurs during analog duplication of photographs: fine detail is washed out and gradually lost.

A black thread is clearly visible against a correctly exposed background but vanishes when it lies in front of the overexposed model astronaut. Credit: PA.

If you examine high-resolution scans of all of the allegedly doctored photographs, you find exactly the same effect: the apparently missing portion of the crosshairs is always on a very bright, overexposed background, and it turns out that often it’s not missing at all but simply very faint.

A high-quality scan of the first photograph in dispute (Apollo 16 photo AS16-107-17446) is shown below. The detail is indicated by the arrow and is shown magnified on the right, revealing that the “missing” crosshair is actually quite present.

Photo AS16-107-17446 and detail of the same picture.

This is instead a better scan of Apollo 11 photograph AS11-40-5931, which is the second allegedly doctored picture. The arrow points to the region where the supposedly missing crosshair is located. It is in actual fact quite visible, although somewhat washed out where it lies in front of a white background.

Photo AS11-40-5931 and detail of the same picture.

In other words, there’s nothing strange about the crosshairs in the lunar photographs. On the contrary, the crosshairs behave exactly as required by the laws of optics that affect photography and therefore are not evidence of doctoring.